An Alabama Murder Mystery

0:07 Discretion is it by its media murder. Every member of law enforcement has a handful of cases that stick with them for the rest of their career. These cases are full of unimaginable cruelty, making them think, how can someone do this to another person, Cases where the perpetrator managed to dodge the consequences of their actions, or cases that went cold despite the best effort of investigators.

0:51 For the Sheriff's office in Mobile County, Alabama, there's one case that fits all three of these criteria, the unsolved murder of Renee michel Bergeron. It was nineteen ninety three when the Mobile County Sheriff's Office received a panicked nine one one call from a local motorist who had seen something unusual lying in a ditch. This strange object turned out to be the body of an unknown woman left in a shallow ditch by the side of the road. When emergency responders arrived, they immediately knew that this was no ordinary death. The body's head had been cut off and was missing from the crime scene, leaving only an unidentifiable torso there were clear signs that the woman had been tortured before she was killed.

1:38 Her genitals had been heavily mutilated and a bladed weapon had been used to make a deep vertical incision between her bare breasts. For the paramedics who were responsible for moving the body, this was one call out that was hard to forget even years later. Sheriff Tom Purvis later described the unknown murderer as being someone who really headed in for the woman, someone who wanted to try to mask the identity, and that was one reason for cutting the head off. In most true crime cases, where a murderer tries to conceal their victim's identity, think like a detective for a moment and tell me why they'd try to do this. It's because they have some kind of connection to the victim which could lead them to becoming a suspect in the case. Like the rest of the investigators involved in the case, Sheriff Purvis was convinced this killer had a reason for wanting his female victim's identity to remain hidden. She had to have personally known her killer. But if this had been the killer's strategy decapitating the body to prevent a positive idea from being made, it failed dramatically. Only twenty four hours passed since the body's discovery when the missing head was found nearby.

2:53 The head was only in the early stages of decomposition and was able to be identified as twenty seven year old Renee Michelle Bergeron identification of the victim opened up countless leads for investigators to follow, and they began to dive into the question of who Renee was, hoping that the answer would lead them to who killed her. It quickly became clear to the investigators that Renee's life had been a troubled one. She had been a pretty well liked teenager growing up with her five siblings in Louisiana, but in her mid teens, Renee had fallen into the vicious cycle of drug addiction, an expensive habits that she was not able to fund. At seventeen, she gave birth to a daughter, but because Renee was unable to take care of her baby, her family looked after the child instead. Eventually, Renee felt that prostitution was the only way that she was going to be able to support herself. When she turned twenty one, she left her four year old daughter and the rest of her family behind and moved to Mobile County, Alabama. Inmobile, Renee was able to escape from the feeling that she was betrayed her family's traditional Catholic values, and she continued to work as a prostitute under the name Maria Martinez. For the six years that she lived in Alabama, Renee lived with a male acquaintance, Maurice Hill. After she was murdered and identified, investigators became aware of Renee's relationship with Maurice, They quickly began to wonder whether he had been involved in the

4:23 murder. They didn't have any real evidence against him, and he passed a polygraph, so Maurice was quickly ruled out as a suspect. He did try to help the investigation and shared with officers that he believed Renee had probably been killed due to some kind of dispute over drugs. Her addiction had been leading her into dangerous places for more than a decade, and it seemed as if this time the danger of the life that she had lived caught up to her. Also, there's this Only a few months before she died, she had faced charges for first degree robbery. She had been accused of driving the getaway car during hold up at her nearby motel, but there wasn't enough evidence and the charges were dropped. Renee's attorney, Rick Williams, believed that it was the robbery charge that led her to her death, saying, I think some people involved in her case were major drug dealers. I think she knew too much and they silenced her. During his interviews with authorities, Maurice Hill was able to give investigators more details about Rene's whereabouts in the days leading up to her murder. Prior to her death, Maurice had not seen her for several months. She had been out of state, working in clubs and taking up modeling jobs for extra cash. She had only been back in Mobile for a few days when she was killed, and according to Maurice, her demeanor changed completely after her trip away. He described her as seeming afraid of something, although he didn't know what that could be. Tom Street, who worked as

5:55 a criminal psychologist for San Diego's Academy of Justice, worked profile Renee's killer. He believed that the killer had been a psycho sexual predator whose criminal behavior would fit into one of two distinct categories. One kind of psycho sexual predator is more structured, more organized, and manipulative in ways that go about selecting, stalking, and victimizing his victim. He described the way that this type of killer would go to great links to remove their victim from their original location, taking them to another place that felt more private. However, the less organized and structured type of psycho sexual predator would act differently, killing more spontaneously and leaving the body at the scene of the crime. Both of these psychological profiles described a possible killer, but they also described completely different behavior patterns. Even though Renee's killer had not succeeded in concealing her identity, he managed to conceal his own, and the potential link between Renee and the person who ended her life was ever uncovered. Over time, all the leads began to dry up, Promising tips ended up taking investigators to dead ends, and finally all the avenues of investigation were exhausted and the murder of Renee Bergeron officially became a cold case. But Mobile County investigators refused to give up on finding out who was responsible for Renee's torture and murder. Even after he eventually retired from his position

7:27 as Mobile County's Sheriff. Tom Purvis found it difficult to move on from Renee's murder and the knowledge that her killer was likely still a free man. He had been the county sheriff for two decades, and out of all the cases he'd worked on, Renee's murder was one of those that had impacted him the most. The way that she had been mutilated and the successful removal of her head, and the fact that she had been carelessly disposed of in a ditch. All of these details made Tom Purvis even more frustrated that he was never able to catch the killer. But while the staff in the Sheriff's office wrote it into new roles, the impact that Renee Bergeron's case had on the department remained the same. Despite not being sheriff at the time that Renee's body was discovered, new Sheriff Sam Cochrane recognized the importance that the case had for the county. He followed in Sheriff Purvis's footsteps, hoping that time would provide them with new ways to crack the case open. More than a decade after the murder, Sheriff Cochrane continues to have faith that something will lead them to the identity of the killer, saying, after a long period of time, a number of things can happen. People lose their allegiance to others, People break up and make admission statements to others. If we get the right type of lead, and with the technology that we have today that we didn't have fourteen years ago, all of these things can benefit us. Renee Bergeron was surrounded by people who may have wanted her dead, disgruntled prostitution clients, scorn drug dealers, thieves, and fellow drug addicts. Law enforce Sin had countless leads,

9:01 but every single one turned out to be a dead end. Thirty years later, despite modern advancements and DNA and evidence processing, her killer has not been caught yet. That's ten Minute Murder for today, brief and bingeable true crime. I'm Joe the host, and I really appreciate you listening. If you're new to Ten Minute Murder, welcome, make yourself comfortable, and please subscribe now so that you can more easily catch up on all of the back episodes. Connect with me on social media and see the pictures what we talk about here in the podcast. It's never gross and graphics stuff, though Zuckerberg would block me so fast if I started posting crime scene photos. Plus I'd have to look at the crime scene photos in order to post them, and I don't want to do that because I enjoy being able to sleep. So no, thanks. And hey, if you'd liked this episode, please leave a rating and review on Apple, Spotify or any place that's possible. Your positive feedback is very much appreciated. Okay, email question for today, Hey, Joe. First off, i'd like to say thank you for doing stories on the murdas, like I asked about before, And second, I was wondering if you could find some stories from Alabama and Montana. The reason for Alabama is because I live here now, but the reason for Montana is because I've almost never heard of one from Montana and I used to live there before I moved here. And a question I've been wanting to ask is how long have you been doing these podcasts and how did you get started? And that

10:33 is from Neali in Alabama. And I hope I'm saying your name right. I apologize if i'm not. Thanks for the email, and welcome to Alabama. The story today I covered because of this email. And as for Montana, I think it comes down to population. That's why you hear me talking about California a lot more New York Texas Chicago, places that have heaps of people. I will do some research though, to find a case from Montana that is a good fit for ten Minute Murder. By the way, if you're listening right now and you know of a case in Montana, email it to me Joe at ten minute Murder dot com. And I've been doing this podcast since the summer that the pandemic was in full swing twenty twenty. Like a lot of people, I was bored at home and I have all of this audio equipment from doing voiceovers, so I thought, hey, I'll start a podcast like one million other people do. I picked a subject that I'm very much interested in, but then also made it like a podcast I would want to listen to because I don't have a lot of time to devote to listening to hours of podcasts all the time, and my attention span isn't always when it should be. So these ten minute episodes they're perfect for me.

11:41 So that's why I created it. Basically, I created a podcast for myself, and it turns out a lot of you like it too, which I really appreciate. Okay, that's it. That is the episode today. Thank you so much for listening, and if you're going off on other things to do, that's cool, but if you're in binge mode, you're gonna stick with me. I'll see you in the next one.